Obama’s Liberal-Progressive-Socialist Vision of Social Justice

President Obama’s actions in office, no matter what he now says about his “business-friendly” administration, reveal his thoroughly ingrained ideology of socialism. That ideology is evoked in sharp focus in his campaign mantra that “the rich” should pay their fair share of taxes.

Supposedly Obama’s monstrous deficit spending and mountainous increases in government debt would be significantly reduced by raising taxes only on the top 10% of tax-payers, who already pay two thirds of all income taxes. Inferentially, income redistribution via those higher taxes on “the rich” will rejuvenate our moribund economy.

One can hope that Obama has abandoned some of the Marxian doctrine of revolutionary violence that he absorbed from avowed socialist Frank Marshall Davis during his youthful days in Hawaii. Of Davis, Wikipedia notes, “The London Telegraph described Davis as an “early influence” on the young Obama, and confirmed that the character “Frank” from Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, was based on Davis.”

Emulating Adolph Hitler’s 1930s campaign strategy of the Big Lie and scapegoating the Jews, Obama’s campaign boils down to blaming “the rich” for our Great Recession and absolving himself from any responsibility.

Marx and Engels resurrected an old theory that declares the value of anything is strictly the amount of labor required to produce it. The point was to elevate the importance of workers, ultimately labor unions, and to downgrade the importance of entrepreneurs and skilled managers. The labor theory of value is opposed to the free-market axiom that goods and services are worth only what a willing buyer is prepared to pay for them.

The labor theory of value has several implications, among them:

First, income from investment of savings or inheritance is immoral, because it is not earned by physical labor. The IRS pays obeisance to the labor theory of value by classifying and taxing differently so-called “unearned income,” interest and dividends from investments.

Second, entrepreneurial and managerial competence doesn’t count. The wages of the owner or manager ought to be the same as the wages of any other worker, based on the number of hours that he does physical labor. In a socialized economy, there are no entrepreneurial owner-founders (such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs), just managers hired by government planners. In that regard, note Obama’s recent statement that entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses, someone else (i.e., the government) did it.

Third, business profit that accrues to owners is simply theft of what rightfully should be workers’ wages. Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in an 1840 book expressed the anti-capitalist sentiment with his notorious assertion that “Property is theft!”

Liberal-progressives point to many inequities in American society, which they blame on the individualistic nature of our original Constitutional structure. Their remedy is to eliminate the Fifth Amendment’s protections of private property rights and to ignore the 9th and 10th Amendments, which reserve to the states and to the people all powers not expressly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution. The tyranny of money, say liberals, permits one person to have more than his fellows. There can be no freedom, they say, in a society that permits some people to exercise the power arising from unequal distribution of income.

As there is no evidence for it, this theory must be the basis of oft-repeated charges of widespread racial discrimination bruited by Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden.

The bottom line for the liberal-progressive-socialist jihad is equality of income and wealth, or, to put it more accurately, enforced equality of consumption. Everyone, under liberal-progressive-socialism, is entitled to satisfy his needs from the socialized output of society, regardless of whether he contributes to that output. This is to be financed by taking wealth from more productive individuals and giving it to selected social classes of people. Hence Obama’s insistence upon higher taxes for “the rich.”

In that perspective, the original Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, was focused wrongly upon individual political liberties to forestall arbitrary exercise of government power. Equal opportunity, in that view, is a delusion, because it gives free rein to individual abilities, which inevitably will mean that some people become wealthier than others. Liberal-progressive-socialists aim for a political society in which all goods and services are available to everyone, solely on the basis of need.

Re-electing Barack Obama will keep in the presidency a man whose personality is deeply imbued with that liberal-progressive-socialist myth of egalitarian harmony.

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The View from 1776presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787.